My name is Alan Maricle, and I am in a position to know that the development team of Ethereum Link are liars. Here's how.
On 23 August 2017, I responded to a help-wanted post on Ethereum.Link's Careers page for a Brand Evangelist, as my experience, interest, and qualifications fit that role well. I included a Word document showing marked corrections for their whitepaper, which was quite honestly riddled with poor grammar, invisible text, and inconsistent spelling, telling them that they could use the corrected version free of charge even if they didn't hire me. I was contacted by "Steven Kelly", the personage who claims to be the CEO of Ethereum Link. His reply included this text:
It is very interesting your profile for us and what you can offer to Link Platform, we would like to advance further into the fulfillment of this possition by having a dialog via skype or slack chat in order to discuss the job benefits and your availability. Kindly add me into skype with the following ID: live:steven_9648
It was clear that my expertise in English syntax could come in handy for the Ethereum Link team!
On Tuesday, 29 August, "Steven" and I connected via Skype chat. At the beginning of that which amounted to my job interview, I suggested we could have a video chat or at least an audio phone call. "Steven" demurred, insisting he preferred to conduct our first interaction by text chat. As it turns out, that would be the norm the entirety of the time I worked for Link.
With a minimum of interview, "Steven" told me I was hired, to begin work on 11 September 2017.
On 11 September, I logged into Skype chat and continued interacting with "Steven". Company email ([email protected]) was set up, I was added to the Slack chat eventually, and I believed I was on my way toward contributing to the growth of a new and helpful ERC20 token with a lot of upside and potential. I asked to be paid in LNK tokens because I believed the token could grow significantly and so as to ease any financial burden on the company, allowing it to have more liquidity to invest in growth.
I set to work among other things cleaning up all the whitepaper translations on their site, sending numerous suggestions to the management "team" about site corrections they could make, and researching cryptocurrency and silver so I could better understand the macro environment, so as to talk intelligently about it all. I asked "Steven" about training, and he told me it would be forthcoming.
I also began reaching out to currency exchanges to get the ball rolling on adding LNK for trading.
Two weeks in, I began to see posts on social media and in private correspondence related to the lack of clarity surrounding the leadership "team" of Link. I prefer a more direct approach when feasible, and so brought the concerns to "Steven" via chat.
By this point, I was somewhat suspicious myself. I had found no trace of Steven Kelly, Alexander Dawson, Alicia Alcantara, or "Michael Y" anywhere on social media. None of them had any profile even on LinkedIn. "Michael Y", who has not bothered even to post a real photo on the Link Team page, said his last name was "Williams", but Williams does not begin with a 'Y', and his email address was simply [email protected].
Further, it was really beginning to bother me that Michael, Steven, and Alexander all wrote the same way, making very similar English syntax mistakes. It bothered me further that "Alicia Alcantara" had never responded to any of my emails or chat requests, not only when I was saying "Hello, nice to meet you", but also when I had real questions about the marketing she was doing and how it interacted with what I was doing or thought of doing.
Trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, I figured that "Steven" was possibly not a native English speaker. Perhaps he was a second-generation immigrant whose parents still spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hindi at home; such a thing would explain his non-native English, his mistakes. I asked "Steven" about this.
Here is a perfect example of what I mean by substantive English mistakes. I had asked permission to go to an ETH-related Meetup in my city of residence during work hours. "Steven" said that I was totally free to assist the meeting. This is not a mistake that any native English speaker would make. His explanation was that he is often in a hurry:
Yet that is not the sort of error one makes when one is in a hurry. Hurried people misspell complex words, abbreviate, skip punctuation, and otherwise use shortened texting style communication. That is completely understandable. Being in a rush simply does not explain words out of order in sentences and flat out using the wrong word (like "assist" instead of "attend"). I as a trained and experienced English teacher and editor recognise these sorts of errors. Neither Steven, Michael, nor Alexander type as a native English speaker would. Further, they rarely employed texting style communication; the problem is that their English, while good, is definitely not native-level. "Assist" instead of "attend" is an error frequently made by French and Spanish speakers, for "assister" and "asistir", respectively, are the translations of the English "attend".
Thus, Steven's explanation holds no water. Being in a hurry would lead to different kinds of mistakes. Steven claimed to have been born and raised in California, not a speaker of English as a second language. I became even more suspicious at this point. I justified continuing my involvement with Link because they were indeed paying what we had agreed, I had not been asked to lie or do anything illegal, I didn't see any evidence they were doing anything illegal, and I thought their lies were of relatively little consequence.
Later a subreddit was created and my account, ETH_LNK, was made moderator. I posted a few posts there, at least one of which has since been deleted in Link's scrubbing of my participation with them, though one post still remains at time of this writing.
I requested to be added as a content creator or moderator to the Link Facebook page. Steven assured me that I would be sent an invitation to take up that role and be able to post things from the Facebook page. I never received any such invitation, despite our confirming that Steven was not mistaking my profile URL for someone else's. I was also never told who was in charge of the page, though it seemed quite strange that Alicia, ostensibly in charge of marketing, did not manage it:
Into the third and fourth weeks of my working for Link, "Steven" became less and less communicative. I had received very little guidance as far as what he wanted me to do, and I was trying to make myself useful, but the slowness of response from Steven, Alexander, and Michael, as well as Alicia's total unresponsiveness, was getting harder and harder to explain and tolerate. I nevertheless continued to attempt to help Link succeed, for example by cataloging each instance of when the whitepaper translations or website referred to "LKNS token" instead of "LNKS token" and trying to interact on reddit and silver- and Ethereum-related forums. Until...
Having worked my regular Monday shift, I asked "Steven" for Tuesday off so I could spend time with visiting family. He agreed. Wednesday, 11 October 2017, I sat down to begin my daily shift and found that my
- company email,
- Slack chat, and
- subreddit moderator privileges
had all been revoked. I was completely locked out. I had received zero communication expressing any dissatisfaction with the job I was doing. I received no email to my private email account, the one by which I had originally applied to the job. No phone call, no Slack chat, no Skype message. Nothing. Essentially, a simple, abrupt kick-ban. My emails to the team have gone unanswered to this day.
Adding to the suspicious nature of all of these events, I created a dummy account ("Ross") in the Link Slack chat and asked the following question. Note Michael's reply.
How to explain this?
- Michael is genuinely ignorant of what happened to me because Steven keeps him in the dark about his dealings with other team members, even who is hired and fired
- Michael is lying
Either way, that sort of behavior is not what I am looking for from a firm in which I intend to invest much money or confidence.
The Slack chat remains approximately as active as it was before I was kicked, with a user asking a question every two to three days. Interestingly, one user recently asked about how Link compares to BitConnect:
Note Michael's positive comparison between the two, lending credibility to BitConnect. This may be reading too much into his response, but is he unaware of BitConnect's growing reputation as a scam? Perhaps the resident blockchain expert for Link is indeed simply ignorant of widespread cryptocurrency scams.
Or perhaps he himself is a scammer. Is Ethereum Link a scam? I have left my personal opinion open-ended on the matter. They are clearly a team of deceivers.
It is obvious that the team are not native English speakers, though they claim to be, and Steven claims to be a native Californian. They engage people to do work they found important enough to advertise a job for, then drop-kick them for no reason and with no explanation. Somehow Michael Y/Williams is a blockchain expert but neither he nor any of the other team members have any social media profile of any kind at all, and Michael Y/Williams does not even show a real picture of his face on the Team page. Alicia, the responsible party for marketing and design, the person one would expect would be the face of the enterprise, is completely incommunicado. I do not believe Alicia to be a real person. I suspect Michael, Steven, and Alexander are one person, of an origin that is definitely not USA, UK, Canada, or any other English-speaking nation. Possibly Chinese or Indian or something like that.
I simply place all of this information out in public so that you may be informed. I am open to any questions anyone may have. I am a real person. This is my Facebook page. This is my YouTube channel. This, this, and this are videos of me speaking on topics important to me. I had real hopes for this company and their product, but they were based on lies. These are not people anyone should work with.